Baby Steps
Can you remember a time you saw a baby walk for the first time? It’s quite the experience to witness. It’s a joyous moment with lots of hoopla.
We seem to forget how to celebrate baby steps.
It seems we now need to have lengthy leaps before we even consider celebrating, and they don’t happen that often. That gives us less to celebrate and less to feel good about.
We also fail to remember that it was the baby step that launched our walking career. We forget the foundational and focus entirely on fruition. If you can only feel good when the job’s complete, you’ll spend many days, weeks, months, years or decades without celebrating.
There’s an old song whose title says it all – LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT.
We as a society look for sweeping changes. We don’t notice that when a sweeping change comes, the tipping point was caused by a baby step that preceded it.
Reminds me of a story . . .
About 7 years ago I was attending a workshop conducted by Jerry Stocking. There was a woman in the room who had expressive eyebrows. Jerry noticed and asked her to focus on doing something different with her eyebrows over the next few days. He said much of who you currently perceive yourself to be is tied up in the little eyebrow pattern you run. Her only assignment was to work on the eyebrow routine. Within a day, people started to notice a shift in her behavior. By the end of the week, it was like night and day.
It was a little thing.
What little thing can you adjust? What baby step can you take now?
Reminds me of another story . . .
I noticed that I became agitated when I saw the kitchen trash container didn’t have a plastic bag inside. That meant that I or someone else had taken the trash out and neglected to replace the bag. It would be at least a 3 to 5 minute rant in my head about the bag not being replaced. The day the pattern shifted is when I noticed a little thing. The little thing I noticed was that it took 12 seconds to replace the bag. Once this came into my awareness, I did an assessment. Do I do 5 minutes of destructive diatribe or do I take a 12 second action?
I outgrew the trash can rant by noticing a little thing.
Small changes seem to cause a chain reaction. Large changes don’t seem to last. I’m sure there are exceptions to the contrary, but I don’t think there are many.
I think of dieting. There are lots of large changes that go along with dieting and you see the results – lose/gain. But suppose you notice that you don’t completely chew your food while eating. Then you take a baby step to focus on the act of chewing. Let’s say you bring that new focus to your eating for 21 days. You now have automated that new behavior. Without doing anything else, you would lose some weight and keep it off. It’s a little thing.
Don’t get caught up in the idea that the change has to be important. After all, how important are expressive eyebrows? Find some little thing that you do and go to work on it. Think of it as a spiritual practice. What you will notice is that other shifts will automatically happen as a result of completing this one tiny baby step.
Take a baby step today and notice how soon you are off and running in a new direction.
All the best,
John
http://cdbaby.com/cd/johnmorgan
http://www.cafepress.com/grasshoppernote/3580301
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